About C-HIGHER
Welcome to the Center for Historical Games and Heritage (C-HIGHER), founded at the University of Gdansk, Poland, in 2025. As an interdepartmental research and innovation team led by the Faculty of History, C-HIGHER explores the intersection of history, heritage, and games. We aim to inspire educational innovation, promote cultural understanding, and advance game development through research, teaching, partnerships, and creative projects. Our mission is to bridge academia, industry, and nonprofits to craft meaningful experiences for audiences, and impactful solutions for creative industries. We work in four areas – Research, Education, Gamedev, and Nonprofits – and forge synergies between them.
HISTORY HAS A FUTURE – AT C-HIGHER WE MAKE BOTH
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Faculty of History, University of Gdansk
OUR MISSION
The impact of historical games goes far beyond history. We want to explore every avenue where history/heritage-themed games can be catalysts of positive change. Based at a public university, we aren’t a profit-driven business – our commitment is to create lasting value. This is how we see it.
Commercial game industries
There’s money to be had! So-called cultural games are increasingly supported by robust EU and national funding schemes. In the wake of the 2023+ crisis — which drastically limited access to traditional investor funding — co-financing from grant programmes and institutions can be a game-changer for small and mid-sized companies. Public funding helps game studios stay afloat, ship new titles, and save jobs.
→ At C-HIGHER, we’ve experienced this firsthand. In our first month post-launch, we joined five grant proposals with two partners from video game development and two from tabletop. In our second month, we are collaborating on proposals with two national video gamedev associations.
Heritage industry
Museums, heritage festivals, memory sites, and cultural tourism attractions compete for people’s time and attention in today’s engagement economy. Audiences of all ages now expect interactive, immersive experiences. Games meet this demand on multiple fronts. On-site: gamified tours, location-based challenges, XR technology, tabletop gaming, role-playing, and more. Online: virtual heritage tours and online games. Off-site: analog and digital games that amplify the organisation’s (site/city/region’s) brand and expand its educational and public outreach.
→ C-HIGHER works closely with the Second World War Museum in Gdansk and the Polish Center of Discovery and Learning in the USA, while our Faculty’s network connects us with many other heritage institutions.
NGOs and schools
History/heritage games are proving to be powerful tools for education, social integration, and civic empowerment. NGOs and schools use off-the-shelf games but also adapt and redesign them – and develop new ones. Those games go under labels like serious games, applied games, games for change, or games with a purpose. Historical games do more than recount the past: they foster intercultural dialogue, civic education, identity exploration, heritage preservation, decolonization efforts, and more.
→ C-HIGHER currently collaborates in grant projects with the FRUG Foundation for the University of Gdansk, with Games Research Association of Poland, with the Teatrikon Foundation, and with the Topory association.
Research & higher education
Besides game-based learning for students, History departments fund or co-create games for external audiences: as public history or popular science – or a form of historiography (quite a novelty! check historiographic games). Also, research centres provide expert consultancy for creative industries. History/heritage-themed games (commercial and not) involve historians, art historians, archaeologists, museologists, but also experts in classic languages, mythology, regional heritage, and more. Increasingly, consultancy for creative industries is finding its place within university curricula.
→ C-HIGHER’s core team includes historical game consultants and co-creators with experience either in popular science game projects or commercial histgameconsulting. Our Faculty runs a BA programme in Historical Game Design – with historical game consultancy in the curriculum.
Defense and resilience
A major sector of historical games, wargaming is also employed for training and simulations in the military, diplomacy, crisis response, and resilience planning at every governmental level. The integration of wargaming into defense and intelligence education is now globally recognised, as evidenced by the recently launched Master’s program in Wargaming and Resilience Planning (Brunel University, UK). Moreover, games are employed in resilience education addressed to children – for instance, in war-torn Ukraine.
→ C-HIGHER hosts an annual “Games of War” conference on games that refer to the 2014/2022+ Russo-Ukrainian war. Our staff includes two PhDs in political science with specialisation in defense, both with extensive professional or hobbyist experience in tabletop wargaming and RPG.
Peace-gaming in peace education
While wargaming has a long history in defense education, peace-gaming is emerging as a novel field. Its agenda includes creating anti-war games as tools for peace education, advancing game design methodologies that promote non-violent conflict resolution, and developing serious games and training scenarios for civil and military professionals involved in conflict prevention, de-escalation, resolution, reconstruction, and reconciliation. A high-profile 2024 research project led by Cambridge University, involving partners from NATO academies, game researchers, and mediation NGOs, underscores this trend.
→ C-HIGHER’s director worked for a while on the Peace-gaming project during his stay at the Falmouth University Games Academy.
Counterpropaganda
History/heritage-themed games are powerful tools of heritageisation and historical politics. While anti-democratic regimes have exploited it for propaganda and misinformation, games can also be applied for counterpropaganda. The recent initiative CTRL+ALT+DISINFO, sparked by the Global Game Jam, encourages this approach in their international game jam/hackathon dedicated to games that teach media literacy and critical thinking to counter disinformation. Historical games have a role to play in combating misinformation in the realm of politics of memory, heritage and identity.
→ C-HIGHER works with local and foreign partners to counter Russian war propaganda and historical narratives. We do this with the “Games of War” conference, with the CTRL+ALT+DISINFO theme at GGJ 2025, and with a Polish-Ukrainian-Litvin tabletop RPG we are developing with the GRAP association.
Intersectoral collaboration
Each of these sectors stands as a distinct field of professional practice, but they can be powerfully integrated through historical games. We like to point to the example of the Horizon-funded MEMENTOES consortium uniting museums, NGOs, gamedev, and research centres around the development of three deeply impactful serious games about extremely traumatic histories. A truly impressive project, it is poised to inspire historical game-makers for years to come.
At C-HIGHER, we group our activities into four areas: research, education, gamedev, and nonprofits – each backed by dedicated infrastructures, specialised skill sets, and funding schemes. At the same time, there are extra incentives and funding programmes to foster cross-sector collaborations and partnerships. We aim to unite these diverse yet connected fields, maximising synergies for innovation, impact, and growth.